Announcing Jetpack 1.2

Here at Jetpack HQ we’ve been working hard over the last few weeks, finishing up a major update for Jetpack: we’re calling it Jetpack 1.2.

Among other highlights for this release are two of the most frequently requested features: support for Google+ in the Sharing toolbar and Email subscriptions, a feature which lets your readers get every single post on your blog direct to their email inbox.

Other new features and enhancements include:

Email subscriptions to your blog

Improved UI for showing new and updated Jetpack features

Better support for other languages

Smarter and safer Jetpack upgrades

New Shortcodes for VideoPress & Google Maps

Added LinkedIn and Google+ buttons to Sharing UI

Image Widget

RSS Links Widget

To download:

If you have an earlier version of Jetpack: go to Dashboard->Updates. If Jetpack isn’t listed, click the Check Again button (it may take a few minutes for Jetpack 1.2 to appear).

Updates to the Sharing toolbar constitute a ‘major rev’ for Jetpack? Seriously? Methinks a fair number Jetpack followers are waiting for more substantial additions, such as Highlander comments from WP.com. Amirite?

Thanks alot, crew! I hope this is the beginning of a bit more frequent updates . 🙂

Two things though:

1. Sorry for nagging about this, but the new comment function (the one available for wordpress.com users, where you can choose to login with wordpress/twitter/facebook). It’s really crucial; at least I think so. I tried both Disqus and Intense Debate, but I want something lighter, where I don’t need to sync my comments to an external site.

Again, sorry for bringing it up only minutes after a really good update. I just feel like it’s such a wanted function, it would be unfair not to mention it.

2. The e-mail subscriptions. Good job, but would it be possible to translate them into other languages (Swedish for me)? Preferably without having to go into the code.

Hi Daniel. Thanks for the emphatic request for the WordPress.com comments UI. We hear you and will keep this in mind as we plan future releases.

I know that sounds like the kind of generic response you often see when users of a service make requests, but I can promise it’s not generic. We actually keep track of requests and that does impact the decisions we make, and I am a real person and not a auto-comment request responder (Although, this is exactly the kind of thing a great auto-comment responder would say)..

On #2 – The subscriptions UI is pretty sparse, it wouldn’t take much effort to manually translate. But we can see about supporting more languages in the future.

I swear I had seen a thread mentioning months ago that it might “someday” come to jetpack… I think on .org support forums and I recall ipstenu posting in the the thread… and I think someone mentioning the “code name” for the comment platform… but I can’t find it again… or remember the internal/product name for it…

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We saw that happen occasionally in our testing, but couldn’t reliably reproduce the problem. The errors should go away on the next page load. If you continue to experience problems, please contact support.

I have a similar problem. I could not get to the Jetpack upgrade from the upgrade icon (even after hitting “try again”). and so did it yesterday from the plugin procedure – and got the standard, expected response: “Jetpack updated successfully”).

The Google +1 button is too small, it would be great if it was the same height as the twitter and facebook buttons. Also, it loads a bit slower than any other button (but perhaps that issue is on the Google side).

Another problem is that when adding something after the facebook like-button, there is a huge gap before the next button appears. Also, that may be due to buggy facebook-coding.

We’re working on cleaning up some of the inconsistencies in the Sharing buttons. The speed of the Google+ button probably isn’t something we can change, and is probably dependent on many external factors. For me, for example, it loads quite quickly, and some of the others are much slower.

The Facebook button is notorious in its lack of width intelligence. The issue is with their implementation.

Thank you for the update. I’d like to add to the “google+ button inconsistency” problem. If possible, I’d prefer it there was a choice beetween a simple link and a “smart button” like in the other cases, mostly so that the link could be styled to match the rest of the theme.

Finally, an update! And with great new features – thank you! Now my initial nits…

1) Google +1 sharing icon is too small compared to the others.
2) I tried to subscribe to a comment and the site was listed on the user management web portal as “Jetpack” and hyperlinked.
3) Sidebar subscription widget is pretty ugly – can we do something better?
4) Related to blog post subscriptions, anyone know of a way to port folks from Feedburner?
5) Related to not-so-hot formatting, anyone know where I can find info how to customize the Twitter sidebar widget via CSS?

1) Yup. We’re working on ironing out some of the inconsistencies.
2) Can you please contact support with more information and a screenshot?
3) The widget tries to do as little as possible to respect the theme’s widget styling.
4) Importing subscriptions is something we’re considering, but aren’t yet sure the best way to handle everything.
5) There’s some basic information at http://en.support.wordpress.com/css-basics/, but it’s not specific to Jetpack widgets, and it’s geared toward the WordPress.com audience. If you’re familiar with CSS, that link won’t help much: just look at the widgets markup and have fun. If you’re not familiar with CSS, there’s lots of forums that are helpful.

In a future update perhaps give the user the option to select the size. Valid values as ‘small’ (15px), ‘medium’ (20px), and ‘tall’ (60px). For ‘standard’, which is 24px, omit the ‘size=’ attribute completely, it is the default. You could also give people the option of choosing the ‘inline’ annotation (annotation=”inline”) or no annotation (annotation=”none”). The default, which you use, is to omit the annotation attribute and get ‘bubble’. See http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html

Some guys here were able to fix the stats issue by deactivating the WP dashboard stats!
Well, As far as I know of, I don’t have this plugin installed and yet the Stats are not working.

Strangely enough, about a month ago I received Jetpack Version 1.1.4-alpha, and that version is working fine ! Even now, I deleted the 1.2 version, reinstalled the alpha version again, and yes , it works fine. I would think, that, by comparing the two versions the people behind Jetpack should be able, by comparing the two versions, it must be possible to find what is causing the error.
But, ok, I am not a programmer and I guess its not that simple…?
Anyway, I am confident the will come up with a fix 🙂
In the meantime, I run the alpha version .

I just updated and am having trouble with JetPack. I had the same problems as William Bowles. Now everything seems to “work” okay – however, the stats function has disappeared. I can configure it, but there is no place to view them anymore. When I go to the old url for my stats page, it tells me i don’t have permission to use the feature. Any thoughts?

Oddly enough my Sharing doesn’t work anymore the link has disappeared from Settings, and when I click Sharing from the jetpack UI it throws this error “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.
Internal Server Error” etc etc

same problems as stated above. once upgraded stats page is no longer accessible. upgrade also threw tons of header url errors and fatal error when connecting to wordpress (deactivated then re-activated plugin). Can configure all options, but nothing else and dashboard view is now gone

Same problem, same solution. Have not read this whole thread yet, so sorry if this is a duplicate, but I noticed one additional stats issue. Before I tried the above solution, I tried going to JetPack Stats/Configure, since occasionally plugin upgrades wipe out settings (and manually restoring them will bring back functionality).

Once I applied the above solution, the Visit Site Stats link fixed itself as well. So, not sure if this is already known, but the two seem related, so I thought I’d post in case it helps pinpoint the cause of the bug. Thanks for the plugin.

2. When continuing on after hitting the G+ button, to share the post on Google+, the preview text is the hidden text from the top of page, not the post content. I.e. in Twenty Eleven: “Main menu. Skip to primary content. Skip to secondary content. Home; [the nav menu…]”. Is there any way to fix that? I’m using WP Super Cache on that site, if it matters.

Good question, looks like we didn’t include a link to our support documentation.

http://en.support.wordpress.com/google-maps/ will tell you how to embed a Google Map. You don’t really need to worry about the shortcode, just paste the iframe embed that Google Maps gives you and Jetpack will take care of the rest.

Add me to the list of folks for whom the stats are just completely missing after the upgrade to 1.2. For a while the whole thing (all Jetpack functions that I had enabled) crashed, but was able to get it back after completely uninstalling the plugin and then re-installing – except the stats are completely gone. Thanks for the link to get them at the wordpress.com account in the meanwhile. I’ll be looking forward to the next patch that fixes this!!

it looks ugly, nice tables and formatting are all missing
the bar graph at the top doesn’t display
the Yesterday tabs do not work – clicking them does nothing
while the weekly tab does work, again the formatting is ugly and broken
IE 8 reports Errors on Page

I think, though, that you may be able to fix it by going to Admin → Jetpack, and clicking “Configure” on the “Spelling and Grammar” box. Then, under “Proofreading”, uncheck both checkboxes under “Automatically proofread content when”. (Those two checkboxes are labelled “a post or page is first published” and “a post or page is updated”.)

Sorry you’re having trouble. The error message you are seeing suggests that you may have two different WordPress.com accounts or API keys. You should contact support and they can help you sort out which one to use for your site.

After I installed the latest version of Jetpack (1.2), I could not see my stats anymore.
I uninstalled and installed Jetpack again, but now I cannot connect to wordpress.com and activate the plugin. When I try to do that, I get the following messsage:

Thanks, Scott. As a follow-up: I just found a problem with the email subscription on my self-hosted multisite setup, as follows:

1 – I activated JetPack on one of the sites in the multisite and put the email subscription widget in the sidebar for that site.

2 – I subscribed with an email address unassociated with any of the blogs on my multisite.

3 – When I received the email to confirm I wish to subscribe, the email subject line listed one of the OTHER blogs in my multisite. The blog referenced in the email doesn’t even have JetPack activated.

A few additional details about the subscription problem, Scott, in case they help with troubleshooting.

I went ahead and confirmed the subscription to the “wrong” blog to see what would happen. Sure enough, when I visited my new subscription page at wp.com, the blog listed is the wrong one and the link takes me to the wrong site.

However, the site stats for the correct site show my fake person as a subscriber.

When I put up a test post on the correct site, I did not receive it in the email account used to subscribe.

On a different facet of JP, the stats section where it asks you to count the posts/pages registered users access (I have it checked), but does it register every post that’s accessed whether by registered users or not?

Yes, I think so. The problem I have is that most of my site is not in WP (10,500 posts), it consists of flat html pages that I created before WP even existed and there’s a lot of them, maybe 15-20,000 pages in total. They’re all in the same root directory but of course WP doesn’t know they’re there. Moving them into WP is just not on. I have a custom Google engine that searches the entire directory and a WP search just for the WP posts but I don’t like the WP one. In the old days I used to be able to use a beautiful Boolean engine that was so flexible and even output thee results in all kinds of permutations to a text file (I’m talking System 7 or even earlier for the Mac).

Re the check boxes under comments: Be nice if you could tighten it up, put them on one line please it looks so ugly and a waste of space. An unfortunate aspect of the design of most blogs is the bad use of screen space, bloody great gaps everywhere, no room even for white space.

One challenge of UI design is we have to make layout choices with different languages in mind. Most languages use 30-40% more space than English does, so if a blog is French or Spanish, much of that whitespace will be filled.

I am having trouble styling the submit button on the email subscriptions form. Everything else is styling as expected with the css, but I cannot get submit botton to take on all of my styling (specifically the width).

I am with several of the above commenters – I will switch from Feedburner to Jetpack as soon as there is a way to move existing readers over (and, preferably, a way to also get them out, in case WP.com ever drops its service)..

For email subscribers, I only want the title and perhaps an excerpt sent so that readers come back to the site. That way they 1) will be recorded in our overall stats 2) will read the post within the environment it was meant to be read in 3) will have the option to easily share the post via Facebook, Twitter etc. 4) will be more likely to leave comments etc.

As an initial test, I subscribed to my own site and found that the whole post was sent to me by email. After deactivating the subscription option I noticed that only the title was sent to me. It would be great to have this option when permanently activated. Is there any way to currently do this? In the meantime I intend to leave the subscription option deactivated, which is a shame.

This thing of subscriptions on Jetpack is bull. It sends entire posts to subscribers and that limits the amount of traffic coming to the website, some of the subscribers end up coping the posts to their sites without acknowledging the source. It must be addressed with immediate effect.

I love this plugin, but I can’t use it with my theme. What happens is, as soon as the plugin is activated, all my widgets disappear from the widget area. Also, I can not deactivate the plugin from the plugin page. I have to delete Jetpack from the server. I am using a premium theme from Themeforest. I’d love to have a solution. Anyone?